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SEIFFE:  Barackenstein

Sunday, August 17, 2008 

By Ralf Seiffe

One of the most iconic Hollywood monster movies is 1931’s “Frankenstein”, the story of a mad scientist creating a living monster from the body parts of corpses his assistant steals. While the movie takes massive liberties with the original Mary Shelley novel, many fans agree that this is the best of many cinematic presentations.

What makes the tale so timeless is this story’s particular notion that restoring life to that which has died can bring nothing but grief. The monster, brilliantly realized by Boris Karloff, engenders universal revulsion with its size, malice, immorality and imbecility. Perhaps Barack Obama should visit his local Blockbuster and rent a copy of “Frankenstein”. It will show him the fallacy of assembling a national vision from the corpses of dead public policy.

The “candidate of change” seems to have the same interest in reanimating cadavers as the fictional Dr. Frankenstein did.  Instead of stealing dead bodies of executed criminals however, Obama has exhumed the failed policies of the New Deal, The Great Society and the rest of the economic alchemy that makes up Democrat dogma.  Dr. Barackenstein has assembled a collection of leftover policies that trial has killed and, like the original Dr. Frankenstein, he proposes to recycle these dead policies into a new creature--Barackenstein’s monster.   The talented doctor has managed to camouflage this Golem as “change”.

The presumptive Democratic nominee’s fiend starts with a torso of enormous scale and appetite, full of complex internal organs that must be controlled from a centralized power and dependant on the peripherals.  Keeping it viable has compelled Dr. Barackenstein to attempt importation of failed national health care plans other nations have installed at ruinous expense.

One imagines Dr. Barackenstein has created the fiend to gain control of the economy for his own purposes starting with arms and hands.  For a right arm, Obama has sutured the mortal remains of class warfare onto the corpse in the form of higher taxes on investments, initiative and success.  The dead hand of regulation is crudely attached.  On the left side, an arm created from the moribund “Fairness Doctrine” grafted to the politics of envy and dependence form a useless appendage.   

The legs which should propel the creature come from the carcass of Nixon and Carter’s energy policy of the 1970’s.   For one leg, Obama plans to prop up the monster with the thoroughly departed windfall profits tax which once drove oil producers from the United States.  The other leg is the dead end of sending more than a billion dollars a day to our enemies rather than keeping the money here and creating energy self reliance, once an American objective.

For a heart, Obama has found socialism for his yet unanimated beast.  It will prove to be an aged, rejected transplant that first pumped in the 19th century and has given the world chest pains for more than 150 years.  But socialism is the politics of gangsters so a heart is not enough, the monster needs a brain to invent more ways to take. In the movie, Dr. Frankenstein sends his assistant Fritz harvest a brain from the local morgue but he drops the good one and takes the criminal’s brain instead.  No such literary device is necessary for the Barackenstein’s monster--it will be the genetic heir of the ultimately corrupt Chicago political machine.

The movie’s best scene occurs when the insentient monster is placed on a gurney and cranked to the top of a watchtower in order to attract lightening.  A jolt from out of the blue is the energy needed to reanimate the doctor’s assembly of necroses.  Obama’s fabrication needs no such external shock; his glittering, out from the blue personality is self-contained lightening—he’s the spark he’s been waiting for.   Like the egoist that was Victor Frankenstein, Barackenstein knows the mere touch of his electrical personality will easily revivify this monster of bad ideas.

My worry is the danger this experiment will present to our children.  In the story, the monster gains the trust of a naïve young girl and then murders the child by throwing her into a lake.  The poor thing gave her unfound trust to but in return, the destructive giant turns on her.   The same fate awaits those who trust Dr. Barackenstein’s recycled synthesis of socialism’s dead ideas; like Frankenstein’s monster, they look new and novel but in the end, will do violence to human rights.  Barackenstein’s creation may look like the change we can believe in and it may continue to fool naïve children.  But restoring life to this monstrous corpse of rotting dreams will bring nothing but grief, no differently than did Frankenstein’s original. 

Ralf Seiffe advises business start-ups and product launches from Chicago, Illinois and is a political analyst and columnist for the Illinois Leader and Illinois Review.

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